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Thursday, 28 May 2020

“Society is still worth protecting, don’t you think?
Maybe now more than ever.”

-– Saleema Nawaz, Songs for the End of the World

Almost two months ago, the Montreal writer, Saleema Nawaz
received considerable attention in the Canadian media for her novel Songs for the End of the World, about a
respiratory pandemic ravaging 2020 America that bears startling similarities to
the current COVID-19 Virus. Among them: the devastation of New York City from a
mysterious infectious virus that originated in China; the inconvenience of self
quarantines; the individuals on the front line – police and health care workers
– risking their lives to save the lives of individuals afflicted with this
virulent pathogen; the need for personal protective gear; social distancing
ordinances; conspiracy theories posted on social media, and anti-Asian hate
crimes. The novel took six years to research and write, and Nawaz’s imagination,
combined with her knowledge about previous pandemics from the Spanish flu
(1918-1920) to SARS, is etched into her narrative. Still, given her prescience,
it is unsurprising that Songs,scheduled to be published in late
August, was rushed into an e-book in early April.

Saturday, 25 April 2020

"It's about:
What if the magnetic forces at work in our country were just given a little
push in one direction. What if a certain kind of intolerance was just given a slight nod from powers on high?"

– Zoe Kazan, actor on the HBO series, The Plot Against America

“History
is a nightmare from which none of us can wake.”

– James Joyce, Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man

This
review contains spoilers

Michelle K. Short of HBO photographed the screenshots

In Anti
Social, a riveting account of the alt-right online trollers who elevate the
persuasive narrative above any semblance of accuracy, evidence or fairness,
Andrew Marantz interjects the wisdom of the philosopher, Richard Rorty, who
contends that history is not preordained but is contingent and depends on the
way people bend its arc. I thought about Rorty and Marantz’s far-right profiles
as I reread The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth and watched the six-part gripping HBO mostly-faithful television
adaptation by creator David Simon and his collaborator Ed Burns, widely known
for their productions among others of The
Wire and Treme. I found the
gradual slide into fascism in America more convincing in The Plot than I did when I first read it in 2004 – likely because
of the current American political climate – and that the Simon’s and Burns’s rendition
offers innovations that enhance the relevance of the novel by creatively blurring
the distinction between the early 1940s setting and our time.

Monday, 20 April 2020

“The past is intrinsic to the present, despite any
attempts to dismiss it.”

—Ariana Neumann

Ariana Neumann’s moving, beautifully-written memoir, When Time Stopped: A Memoir of my Father’s War and What Remains by Ariana Neumann
(Scribner 2020) chronicles her search to shed light on the early secretive life of
her Czech-born father, Hans, whom she remembers as an art-collecting,
successful philanthropic business man. But her account is as much a mystery as
a memoir because she combines the tools of both a sleuth and historian to
unearth her father’s life.

Currently, a
London based journalist, Ariana spent her formative years in a well-heeled home
nestled in Caracas Venezuela. Although her father’s early life for her was
basically a tabula rasa, she remembers awaking to her father’s screams uttered
in a foreign language. He would say nothing about what provoked these
nightmares and he discouraged her from asking questions. At that time, raised
as a Catholic, she did not even know she was Jewish. Later as a college student
when they both travelled to his homeland in Czechoslovakia, Hans revealed little, apart from a sob near
an old railroad station: “Sometimes you have to leave the past where it is—in
the past.” The underlying purpose of his daughter’s research and writing is to
challenge that assumption.

Wednesday, 27 November 2019

"The greatest threat to liberal democracies does not come from immigrants and refugees but from the backlash against them by those on the inside who exploit fears of outsiders to chip away at the values and institutions that make our societies liberal."— Sasha Polakov-Suransky, Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy, 2017

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t to misinform
or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate
truth.”

— Garry Kasparov

"Populists in power tend to undermine countervailing powers which are the courts, which are the media, which are other parties."— Cas Mudde, Populism: A Very Short Introduction, 2017

Thursday, 21 November 2019

“We just need to open our eyes, and our ears, and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.”— Barack Obama speaking in Selma on March 7 2015 at the fifth anniversary of the famous march"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their pain."— James Baldwin

“We were eight years in power. We had built
schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the
penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt
the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the
road to prosperity.”

W.E.B. Du Bois

— Thomas Miller, South Carolina Congressman,
1895

“If
there was one thing that South
Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government."

—W.E.B. Du Bois

“Yet, the harsh fact is that in many places in
this country, men and women are kept from voting simply because they are
Negroes. Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny
this right.”

Wednesday, 20 November 2019

"Beard’s
primary subject is female silence; she hopes to take a “long view on the
culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public
sphere of speech-making, debate and comment”, the better to get beyond “the
simple diagnosis of misogyny that we tend a bit lazily to fall back on”.
Calling out misogyny isn’t, she understands, the same thing as explaining it,
and it’s only by doing the latter that we’re likely ever to find an effective
means of combating it. The question is: where should we look for answers? Beard
acknowledges that misogyny has multiple sources; its roots are deep and wide.
But in this book, she looks mostly (she is a classicist, after all) at Greek
and Roman antiquity, a realm that even now, she believes, casts a shadow over
our traditions of public speaking, whether we are considering the timbre of a
person’s voice, or their authority to pronounce on any given subject.

Personally,
I might have found this argument a bit strained a month ago; 3,000 years lie
between us and Homer’s Odyssey, which is where she begins, with
Telemachus effectively telling his mother Penelope to “shut up”. But reading it
in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it seems utterly,
dreadfully convincing. Mute women; brutal men; shame as a mechanism for
control; androgyny and avoidance as a strategy for survival. On every page,
bells ring too loudly for comfort."

Sunday, 10 November 2019

"There's no such thing here (in South Africa). The facts may be correct but the truth they embody is always a lie to someone else. Every inch of our soil is contested, every word in our histories." – Rian Malan, The Lion Sleeps Tonight 2012“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his
skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to love, for love
comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

– Nelson Mandela

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

“Having looked the beast in the eye having asked and received
forgiveness, let us shut the door on the past and not forget it but to allow it
not to imprison us.”

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 2

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 1

About Me

Author of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions (2012) and second volume, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions (2013).